AASCU and 10 of its member institutions partner to equip college students with the ability to navigate the online news environment

(WASHINGTON, D.C.)—Today, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project (ADP) announced its new initiative, Digital Polarization: Promoting Online Civic Literacy. Preparing students with the skills to combat digital polarization and fake news is a complex problem. The initiative aims to equip college students with the skills they need for online civic reasoning, and to encourage them to make positive interventions in the online information environments they inhabit.

“What we’ve found is giving students a few simple techniques to verify and investigate the information that comes to them in their daily feeds can make a massive difference,” said Mike Caulfield, ADP’s civic fellow and director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, who will lead the initiative. “The trick is giving students the right skills—skills for 2018, not 1998.” Caulfield has been recognized for his thinking on these issues, both at national conferences and through Hapgood, his long-running blog on educational technology.

Ten AASCU member institutions have been chosen to develop, pilot and assess an online civic literacy curricula on their campuses: Black Hills State University (S.D.); The City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY College of Staten Island (N.Y.); Georgia College (Ga.); Indiana University Kokomo; Metropolitan State University of Denver (Colo.); Millersville University of Pennsylvania; San Jose State University (Calif.); Texas A&M University-Central Texas; University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Washington State University Vancouver.

In this initiative, students will track, catalog and analyze fake news, while learning deeper truths about polarization, the economics of the web and the psychology of conspiracy theory. The 2016 national election and the current political climate bring into sharp focus questions about facts, news and information. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have a profound influence on our national discourse, national politics and election processes. Social media is challenging traditional news outlets, calling into question the credibility of traditional reporting and formerly trusted sources of information. Citizens need to find and make sense of the best information available if they are to make the best decisions possible.

Participating campuses will develop, adopt and assess an online civic literacy curricula focused specifically on vetting the information students encounter online. The initiative will incorporate digital polarization and/or civic online information literacy into new and/or existing courses across a variety of disciplines and in co-curricular activities. Such events and offerings might take the form of library orientation events, invited speakers, community panels, professional development trainings, and/or common readings.

“The need for digital fluency has never been more urgent, as our reliance on social media and the internet for news and information only continues to grow. We are confident that this work will help advance student online civic literacy and elevate best practices for teaching digital fluency, while improving our information environments,” said Amanda Antico, executive director of ADP. “The Digital Polarization initiative is a timely solution to a problem that is affecting America’s democratic and civic engagement.”

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The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is a Washington, D.C.-based higher education association of more than 400 public colleges, universities, and systems whose members share a learning- and teaching-centered culture, a historic commitment to underserved student populations, and a dedication to research and creativity that advances their regions’ economic progress and cultural development. These are institutions Delivering America’s Promise of Opportunities for All.

Much web literacy we’ve seen either asks students to look at web pages and think about them, or teaches them to publish and produce things on the web. While both these activities are valuable, neither addresses a set of real problems students confront daily: evaluating the information that reaches them through their social media streams. For these daily tasks, student don’t need long lists of questions to think about while gazing at web documents. They need concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources.

We go on in the book to supply these concrete strategies, showing how to formulate web searches that will tell you more about the site you are looking at, how to use features like “reverse image search” to track down the origin of viral photos, and more generally how to execute a short search strategy that traces a claim to a source and then evaluates that source quickly.

We’ll be adding more chapters going forward, on things like verifying the identity of people on Twitter, using the Wayback Machine to recover deleted pages, and finding out the true publication date of a webpage (even when the webpage is lying).

The name of the book, with its reference to “student fact-checkers” is meant to highlight the fact that all our students should be learning how to check facts on the web. With significant expansion, the text could form the core of a one-credit course, but we’re just as interested to see it incorporated into other courses.

For this reason, we’ve kept the core of the book short – the entire core is appropriately sized for a week’s worth of reading in an average course. As time goes on we’ll build out the field guide at the back of the work, which should allow instructors to expand or focus the materials as necessary with additional articles

Go visit it on the web, or, if you wish, download it in any of the formats here. If you do download it, keep in mind that we are continually updating it, so periodically grab a new copy.

News Analysis Project

The textbook contains some simple exercises that can be done in class in an afternoon. For people looking for a meatier project, the News Analysis Project puts your student’s fact-checking and analysis skills to use.

We have the whole assignment laid out for students in an assignment handout, complete with rubric, that you can download, modify, and distribute. It can be done as an individual project or a group project. The time required depends on the level of analysis you want from the students and the complexity of the claims that they will analyze, but you should be able to scope it as a one to two week project for complex claims and a classroom activity for simple claims.

We had initially envisioned having many students working on the Digipo wiki posting their work in a Wikipedia-like fashion, but for most instructors this was too much to wedge into a class (wiki instruction and fact-checking instruction at same time is a bit of a stretch).

Instead, for the current project we are asking most faculty to consider having their students complete the project using the Google Docs/Word template and mail it to them. You can then forward them to michael.caulfield@wsu.edu (please zip them up if multiple) for posting on the site.

Students who wish to sign up for the site are welcome to do so of course – all it takes is a .edu email address.

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AASCU’s American Democracy Project is excited to announce a new national initiative on digital polarization to be lead by our inaugural civic fellow, Mike Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver. Mike is a longtime ADP participant and supporter, having been actively involved in our eCitizenship initiative established in 2009 when he was at Keene State College (N.H.) and since at WSU Vancouver. Mike’s expertise as WSU Vancouver’s director of blended and networked learning and his passion for advancing the learning of online communities and ensuring informed civic engagement make him well-suited to lead this new effort and to galvanize the ADP community around advancing student civic literacy in our digital and polarized age.

The Digital Polarization Initiative, or “DigiPo”, is an attempt to build student web literacy by having students participating in a broad, cross-institutional project to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in our Twitter and Facebook feeds. The effort is spearheaded by Mike Caulfield. If you, your class, or campus project or organization would like to participate, complete this Google Form.

Read on to learn more about Mike, the Digital Polarization Initiative and how you can learn more and get involved.

Mike Caulfield

Mike Caulfield is the director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, and ADP campus. He has an extensive background in both net-enabled learning and online political organizing. Since 2005 he has focused his energy on understanding how online communities and open resources can make students and citizens more effective and informed, most prominently at MIT as the first director of community outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium, but also as a founder of a number of local and hyperlocal online communities, and in numerous instructional design projects at Keene State College (N.H.) and WSU.

Mike has been described by George Siemens as one of “a few genuinely original people doing important and critically consequential work” in the field of educational technology. He has worked extensively with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham on applications of wiki to education. His work and thinking about the intersection of social media, politics, and civic literacy has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Newsweek, and Vox. He is the current editor of the EDUCAUSE Review’s New Horizons column on emerging technology, and was a founding member of ADP’s eCitizenship initiative in 2009.

Outside of education, he is possibly best known as a co-founder of the 5,000 member online political community Blue Hampshire in 2006, a site described by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas as “one of the most influential blogs in the nation”, and one of eight blog communities chosen in 2007-2008 for syndication by Newsweek’s Ruckus Project. Blue Hampshire ran from 2006-2014.

The Digital Polarization Initiative

The Digital Polarization Initiative, the effort Mike has chosen to advance as an ADP Civic Fellow, is a project and topic close to his heart, but he needs the help of the community to get it done, and he’s looking forward to working with members on it.

Interested? Read on.

What is Digital Polarization?

We’re using digital polarization as a catch-all term for a number of different trends that we are observing on the web.

The impact of algorithmic filters and user behavior on what we see in platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which tends to limit our exposure to opinions and lifestyles different than our own.

The rise and normalization of “fake news” on the Internet, which not only bolsters one’s worldview, but can provide an entirely separate factual universe for readers to live in

The spread of “callout culture” and harassment on platforms like Twitter, where minority voices and opinions are often bullied into silence.

State-sponsored hacking campaigns that use techniques such as “weaponized transparency” (a term from the excellent Zeynep Tufekci) to try and fuel distrust in democratic institutions.

In certain contexts, each of these things can be valuable. We like seeing news from people like us, even if that restricts our worldview a bit. The line between “fake news” and “minority viewpoint” is not always clear-cut. Bad behavior on the web sometimes need to be called out, and citizens have the right to call powerful people to account. State-sponsored hacking can be use to silence, manipulate, or punish political opponents, but may occasionally uncover important information the public deserves to know.

What we want to look at in this project, both through in-classroom and out-of-classroom activities, are three questions:

What are the effects of these trends on our democracy?

What are the underlying causes of these trends?

If these trends require we act to address them, what can we do to address them, both as individuals and political agents? And how do we do that in ways that don’t destroy the democratic potential of the web?

We want to stress that this is a curriculum of questions, not answers. We’re hoping, for example, that students can also look into issues such as how calls for civility can lead to the “tone-policing” activist communities feel derail discussions at the same time that that students investigate how aggressively argumentative online cultures may discourage participation by certain demographic subgroups.

In the process, we are hoping our students obtain a deeper understanding of how web technologies shape their social and political environments, and learn that taking an active and critical stance toward these technologies can improve our society as a whole.

Students Analyze the News Subproject

We are in the process of putting together an array of projects that you can use to bring these issues into your classrooms and student activities.

We don’t have a cool and hip name for our first project yet. The idea of the project is that students are assigned to read various news articles they get through social media and fact-check them, posting them to a site that acts a bit like a student-powered Snopes. For the moment we’re just calling this “the students fact-check the news project that’s kind of like a student powered Snopes.”

The idea is that this activity could drop cleanly into a wide variety of classes. In a politics class, students might investigate claims about levels of voter fraud, or to what extent rates on ACA-provided insurance are increasing. While claims would be rated as true, false, unsubstantiated, or anything in that spectrum, students would also attempt to bring some nuance to the treatment of the topic. What we’ve found, for example, in our own work, is that many seemingly false claims do have a kernel of truth in them.

But the project doesn’t stop at politics. People in courses on nutrition, for example, could analyze the latest chocolate cures cancer story. Economics students could look at claims that home prices have returned to peak bubble levels.

There’s a couple crucial points to this. The first is that the students are doing real work that will be useful — what David Wiley calls “renewable assignments” as opposed to the disposable assignments we throw in the virtual trash each semester. The work the students do will help to repair our broken information environment and can be used by others.

Second, students will not only analyze the stories they find, but track them down to the source, and document how they spread across the network. We are in the process of both consolidating existing tools to help students do this, as well as creating some new ones.

Finally, since we will be doing this on a wiki, students will be forced to confront opposing opinions, and work together with others of differing views to come to a consensus analysis. In this way we model alternate mode of working on the web, that values engagement with others as much as individual expression. It’s noteworthy that on a web that is becoming more and more polarized Wikipedia is one of the few places on the web which is becoming less biased over time. Showing students this alternate mode of web work is central to the project’s goals.

We’ll be talking more about the “the students fact-check the news project that’s kind of like a student powered Snopes.” as we move forward with it. The hope is to have it up and running by mid-December and run a pilot of it in a half dozen schools by January.

In late spring, we’ll assess the pilot and go from there.

If you are interested in joining the pilot, please email Mike Caulfield at michael.caulfield@wsu.edu. We can set you and your students up on the wiki, provide some course materials that outline what assignments might look like, and get you hooked into a teaching support group for the project.

Other Projects

We are working on other projects that professors can use in their classrooms to help students think through issues of digital polarization. And we’re in the market for more activities — let us know if you have some!

One simple resource we’d point out, to get a feel for the issues, is the Wall Street Journal’s Blue Feed/Red Feed which shows how different news on two personal Facebook feeds might differ depending on your circle of friends and algorithmic filters based on previous likes.

Activities could be as simple as reflecting on the differences in the timelines or as complex as running a similar experiment.

We’re also putting together a reading list on the various themes we outlined above.

Again, though, we’re just getting started on this project. Let us know your ideas, and we’ll work them into our materials.

Note: A wiki is being put together for the January launch, but you can view the current progress on the wiki here.

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Guest Editors:Carolyn Colvin, Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture, University of Iowa; and Keri Franklin, Professor of English, Missouri State University

In 1990, Ernest Boyer called for a reconsideration of scholarship and invited faculty to re-envision 21st Century universities so that the Academy might become a “more vigorous partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems” and “reaffirm its historic commitment to. . . the scholarship of engagement.”

Literacy scholars embrace community engagement as a way to become involved in critical contemporary conversations. Yet, researchers should not be seduced by romantic, well-intentioned motives of community work and fail to acknowledge who is being served by their research. We invite submissions for a special issue on the challenges and opportunities of public engagement and literacy research.

For our purposes, we refer to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching definition of community engagement as “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity” (Driscoll, 2008, p. 39).

Submission topics may include, but are not limited to:

Literature reviews framing the intersection between public and literacy scholarship

Descriptions and assessments of exemplary or innovative projects grounded in public and literacy scholarship

Collaborations among literacy scholars, universities, funding agencies, and community advocates

Leveraging resources and the challenge of building and sustaining community partnerships

Features Section: We seek examples of voices from students, teachers, and community members who participate in literacy initiatives. They may be in the form of traditional essays, photographic essays, multimedia, or video productions.

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Self-government in a democratic state requires a civically literate citizenry. But survey after survey confirms that Americans, on average, are civically illiterate.

Despite this overwhelming evidence of a public deficit in basic constitutional and civic knowledge, the nation has not previously had a research center devoted entirely to studying issues surrounding civic knowledge. But we do now.

The Center for Civic Literacy at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)–an ADP campus–was formed to fill that void. It will pursue an aggressive research agenda focused upon the causes and consequences of the nation’s “civics deficit” and will disseminate its findings broadly, in order to make those findings available to a diverse audience of opinion leaders, educators, and policymakers.

The Center’s Mission is, first, to increase scholarly and public understanding of the dimensions of our civic deficit and the effect of that deficit upon democratic decision-making and civil society; and, second, to identify, develop, and disseminate evidence-based best practices to help educators and others address and correct the problem. Among the many questions it wants to explore are the following:

How do we define civic literacy? Are there elements of civic knowledge essential to democratic participation? If so, what are those elements?

What aspects of civic knowledge are most predictive of civic engagement?

Do individuals with low civic literacy hold attitudes about social, scientific, economic and political issues that vary in a statistically significant fashion from attitudes held by high civic literacy individuals?

Has the growth of social media fostered or inhibited civic literacy?

Why have previous efforts to improve civics education failed? What social or structural incentives might lead to more long-lasting and robust results?

This center, the first of its kind in the U.S., is housed in the IU Public Policy Institute and will publish an online journal, convene a national conference, and conduct research projects that result in peer-reviewed journal articles. The Center received funding from IUPUI’s Signature Centers Initiative and is due to attain IUPUI Signature Center status in 2015.

In the near future, there are plans to unveil a web-based clearinghouse for research done by the Center and others working on these issues, convene its first annual conference, and begin issuance of a variety of planned publications, including but not limited to a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal.The Center is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars in public policy, business, religious studies, history, social work, and education; it is housed at Indiana University’s Public Policy Institute, a well-respected venue with significant experience in innovative social science research.

The American Democracy Project (ADP) is a multi-campus initiative focused on public higher education’s role in preparing the next generation of informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. The project began in 2003 as an initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), in partnership with The New York Times.

The goal of the American Democracy Project is to produce graduates who are committed to being knowledgeable, involved citizens in their communities. Since its inception, ADP has hosted 13 national and 18 regional meetings, a national assessment project, and hundreds of campus initiatives including voter education and registration, curriculum revision projects, campus audits, special days of action and reflection, speaker series and many recognition and award programs.